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Articles on solar radiation management

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Some areas wouldn’t see immediate effects, and there could be serious consequences. Buda Mendes/Getty Images

Solar geoengineering might work, but local temperatures could keep rising for years

Injecting reflective particles into the atmosphere won’t immediately cool the entire planet. A new study shows how parts of the US, China and Europe might still see temperatures rising a decade later.
Solar radiation management involves spraying tiny reflective particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect away some of the energy from the sun Shutterstock

Blocking out the sun to reduce global warming - an idea still in the making

Solar radiation management might be able to reduce some of the risks of global warming while countries get their emissions under control.
The Paris Agreement could provide a forum for international cooperation on risky, planet-scale engineering to cool the Earth. Tatiana Grozetskaya/Shutterstcok.com

US exit from Paris climate accord makes discussing how and whether to engineer the planet even harder

It’s increasingly likely that at some point, the world’s nations will need to broach the fraught discussion of geoengineering. The UN climate accord was a natural forum to do it.
Will the world resort to ‘solar radiation management’ to slow the Earth’s heating? Mark Robinson/flickr

To meet the Paris climate goals, do we need to engineer the climate?

Yes, we blunt the effects of climate change by getting off fossil fuels. But countries’ most ambitious targets imply use of climate engineering schemes – and that discussion should be done in public.
Volcanoes produce large amounts of a gas that interacts with air to produce sulfate aerosols, which act as tiny mirrors in the atmosphere to reflect sunlight – and heat. NASA

Can solar geoengineering be part of responsible climate policy?

Blocking the sun by injecting tiny particles in the atmosphere – called solar geoengineering – can lower the Earth’s temperature but has some real costs. Economists run the numbers.

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